Free Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

whoever? The guy who lives in the house.”
    Mad stuck her hands in front of the space heater. “Gunther doesn’t mind, so long as we bring him groceries and supplies so he never has to leave the grounds. Apparently he hit the lottery decades ago, figured he could wave good-bye to customer service. People stopped venturing onto his orchard, and Gunther stopped venturing off of it.”
    â€œWhat about school?”
    â€œGunther’s too old for school,” said Coco, who burst out laughing. “Ha! Nailed it.” She kept laughing as she pulled a cup of applesauce off the shelf, opened it, and used two fingers to scoop it into her mouth. “Anyway, Mad’s done with school, Baz works at the Cinema Five until he and Zuz get their cab service up and running”—Nzuzi, who was debating which record to pull off the shelf, snapped his fingers once—“and that leaves me. And I’m an orphan.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo, orphans don’t go to school. You gotta have moms and dads to sign shit. Plus, an address. What, I should write
Eleventh Greenhouse on the Right, Maywood Orchard, New Milford
? Might as well add
Cupboard under the Stairs
while I’m at it. It’s a public school, not Hogwarts. I’d get laughed out of the building.”
    â€œHogwarts is definitely the shit, though,” said Mad.
    Coco nodded. “Oh, Hogwarts is the shit.”
    â€œWith the Cornish pasties and treacle tarts and all.”
    â€œI don’t even know what the frak a Cornish pasty is, and I still want one.”
    Nzuzi snapped once, pulled a record off the Shelf of Improbable Things, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the stylus. After the initial hiss of white noise, the music started and Nzuzi broke into dance. Strikingly nimble, he pulled his elbows in, cocked his head to one side, snapped his fingers on every upbeat. It wasn’t synchronized; it was authorized. As if each body part had given permission to the other body parts to go nuts as one.
    Nzuzi was an absolute ace at jigging.
    â€œâ€˜Don’t Stop Believin’,’” said Coco, polishing off the applesauce. “His favorite. Hey, Zuz, you hungry?”
    Still jigging, Nzuzi snapped a finger. Coco grabbed a plastic cup of peaches off the shelf, tossed it to him. He caught it mid-jig, tore back the lid, and dug in.
    I was a real mythology-sucker-legacy-loving type guy. I needed history. I needed know-how. I needed
origin
. I had roughly one zillion questions, and planned on asking one after another until someone shut me down.
    â€œWhat’s with the finger snapping?” I asked, as good a place to start as any.
    Coco said, “One snap means yes, two means no. Zuz hasplenty to say, you just gotta know how to listen.” She tossed the plastic cup into a nearby trash can, leaned back, and spread her arms wide. “So, what do you think, kid? Pretty sweet setup, right?”
    I was done being referred to as “kid” by an eleven-year-old.
    â€œMy name is Vic,” I said. “Or
Victor
is fine.”
    â€œYou mean like—to the victor belong the spoils?” Coco let out a raucous, juicy laugh, little bits of leftover applesauce flying from her mouth. “Maybe we’ll just call you Spoils. How about that?”
    Coco kept talking, but I really couldn’t say what about. Mad had just removed her knit cap; ergo, my head had just removed its eyeballs.
    She’d shown me the scar on the side of her head last night, but even so, I found myself almost completely incapacitated right now, as if I’d had a blown fuse my whole life and someone had only now replaced it. On one side, her hair was long, wavy, unruly, exactly as I imagined; the other side was shaved right up to the top of the temple. Not bald, but buzzed, a total West Coast punk cut. The hair led to the eyes, which led to the lips, which led to the skin, which led to, which led to, which led